Kathy Peiss

On her book Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

Cover Interview of August 28, 2011

The wide angle

Zoot Suit takes issue with historians and other scholars who interpret everyday life and culture largely as expressions of power and politics.

In this view, subcultural styles are a form of resistance to the social order. This perspective originated in the 1960s, and I show how it grew out of the Chicano rights and black nationalist movements, which emphasized the cultural dimensions of social change, as well as the academic discipline of cultural studies. The “politics of style” has become the chief framework for understanding the popular culture of marginalized youth.

I do not hold to an old-fashioned concept of culture as a domain separate from the political world. I would argue, however, that many interpreters of style have imposed a political reading on this phenomenon.

In the case of the zoot suit, they assume that young black men and pachucosexpressed their opposition to discrimination, the government, capitalism, or the war in part through style. This framework turns on its head the approach of the social scientists described above, yet by claiming a fixed meaning for the zoot suit and other youth fashion, they follow in their predecessors’ footsteps.

The historical evidence that the zoot suit is an expression of opposition, a “gesture of refusal,” is slight and ambiguous. In fact, we have relatively little record of the understanding and intentions of those who wore this style. A “fashion statement” does not yield its meaning so clearly. My work examines when, and under what circumstances, the zoot suit has been understood as political, and when it has not.

I have always been interested in the importance of everyday rituals, styles, and interactions in history. I have already written on early 20th century working-class leisure, the history of American beauty culture, and the rise of modern sexual mores. Style seemed an arena in which a modern sense of personal and group identity could be articulated.

My interest in the zoot suit itself came out of an undergraduate course I taught that emphasized research methods and inductive approaches to history. I posed a provocative question—could a fashion cause a riot?—and then we examined a host of primary sources, including newspapers, motion pictures, archival records, and court cases. After the course was over, I couldn’t let the subject go. The “riddle” of the zoot suit, as Ralph Ellison called it, seemed a perfect vehicle to explore the many meanings of style.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011